Tag Archives: Toronto

Why don’t big biz bosses look on paying living wages as one of the challenges of being in business? You know, instead of something to carp about. Why can’t our corporate commanders set living wages as a high level objective, apply the needed thought, creativity and resources and, well, just do it? Or, is it that they just don’t like the idea of living wages to begin with?

image: Sonny Abesamis via Flickr/CC

Fighting reality usually makes its negative aspects worse. Yet, who doesn’t find the idea of a detached home with a few trees and some other bits of greenery surrounding it seductive? It does seem that the reality around that is way ahead of what just may be our biggest commonly held desire. Funnily enough, when reading Matt Elliot’s piece addressing our housing reality in today’s Metro banner ads popped up featuring a nice three-storey with big trees either side.

Economic systems tend to be somewhat stacked against young people from the start because they simply have had less time to accumulate things of value in those systems. With the so-called gig or sharing economy it is starting to look like a significant structural disadvantage to younger persons has begun to reveal itself. Many a young worker has education and tech savvy to contribute. Frustration is rising early on the occupational path as young workers with few options are often encounter the working conditions imposed by app-based and online employers.

From time-to-time, we do give some thought to who gets what in this economy. There are worse places when it comes to inequality and the general discourse on status than Toronto and area. Still, some more thought could be directed to where the wealth comes from, Toronto’s role in a global economy. This feature brings our eyes and minds to one of our most important economic inputs: mining. An input that helps make Toronto what it is but which remains obscure, unconsidered.

Spending a third of your income on housing is generally considered a reasonable proposition. The idea is to have money available for other forms of consumption, like healthy food primarily, while allowing for some resources to support other needs such as moderate savings or recreational activities. Does that sound like too much to ask for in a country like Canada, doubly so in its largest connurbation? Not to us, but a recent feature on cbc.ca describes a fairly typical reality in which half or more of a person’s income goes to the rent. This pressure is a major part of what constitutes precarious housing, along with issues of security and good repair.

Frontier City is about political events in Toronto mid decade and its author’s mission to understand his massive city.
By political events, of course we mean Rob Ford and his train wreck of a mayoralty.

Micallef is a writer, academic and walker. He’s a believer in seeing for himself. Starting with a Ford Nation barbecue (where lots of people were apparently perfectly nice!) he then goes off into the Los Angeles-scaled sprawl from where Ford drew so much of his resentful strength. It took a couple of years of this direct experience, getting around to the far flung wards of Toronto and walking them in the company of twelve political underdogs from the 2014 election, to get the job done. A worthy effort, indeed. If you want the real thing as to how political and social reality work together in the super-sprawl of the GTA nowadays you won’t do better than Frontier CIty.

Of course, this blog would like life to be simpler than Micalleff’s findings. We admit our emotions would be more satisfied by a deeper hatred of Big Rich Rob and his whack job performance as ‘mayor’. Frontier City is why we have (and need) public intellectuals. Bloggers can do only so much of the heavy lifting. Micallef sorts through a huge number of things within the realms of history, planning, economics to create a picture of where Toronto is at.
The picture is disturbing and tough to balance. After decades of looking to the future many of us can be forgiven for wondering why the present is so crap.

Consider the 3-billion dollar single-stop subway for Scarborough. That’s just one self-inflicted thing driving us crazy and showing us our faults as we try to realize our potential. Things ought to be so good here that electing a fucked up slob like Rob Ford ought to have been the last thing on anybody’s mind. That guy cancelled Transit City at the cost of $65m dollars. And his thing, apparently, was saving money? We really may be on the edge of a dark age and a vast nobody-to-blame-but-ourselves wastage.

Public transit issues appear again and again in Frontier City. All the really cheerful things that suburban-poverty.com trades in are found, too, from bed bugs to tower blocks. Anyone looking into the recent history of Canada’s biggest community will find this book a worthy read. I would have liked an index, maybe a further reading list as well and a map. These handy things don’t cost much and they up the value and relevance of hardcover books – objects that typically now cost several hours pay at minimum wage.

Even more, I’d have liked at least one chapter on solutions going forward. A more direct consideration of neoliberalism, the grand grinding ideology of our inequitable times might have helped as well. The passage about infrastructure and storytelling was great, powerful and could be a book someone ought to write.

Frontier CIty isn’t quite angry enough for us but we really liked this one and think you will, too.

Elements of the movement for a fifteen dollar per hour minimum wage that started up south of the border in the fast food industry seems to have arrived at Canada’s biggest, busiest, richest airport. And so it should!